Chapter 5. The Viewer

The reason for you to put all your images into KPhotoAlbum, and
spending hours after hours describing them, is of course that you at some
point want to look at them. For that purpose KPhotoAlbum has an viewer
capable of showing your images and videos. You open the viewer from the
thumbnail view as described in Chapter 4, Thumbnail viewer.

The viewer can be seen in Figure 5.1, “The Viewer”. The viewer
does of course show you the image, but in addition to that it also shows
you the information you specified for each image, including, who is on the
images, where and when it was takes, etc.

Figure 5.1. The Viewer

In case the info box is located on top of part of the images you actually
want to see, you can simply grab it with the mouse, and move it elsewhere
on the image. It is possible to configure what should be shown in the
info box, and of course whether it should be shown at all. All these
options are available by right clicking your mouse on the viewer. The
context menu can be seen in Figure 5.2, “The viewer's context menu”
below.

Figure 5.2. The viewer's context menu

Some of the words in the info box is underlines. If you click the
mouse on one of these words the browser (see Chapter 3, Browsing)
will go into scope of that item. Thus if you click on Anne
Helene the browser will show you all images of Anne Helene, just
as it would have done if you selected People from the
root of the browser, and next selected Anne
Helene.

In the info box you can see a small button with the KPhotoAlbum
logo. Pressing that button will get you to the thumbnail viewer. The
thumbnail view will display all images, and the image you just had in the
viewer will be selected. The idea behind this is the following: you browse
to a given person, and look at the images of that
person. One of the images is from say your high school time, and now you
want to see images from that period of time. Using the Jump to
Context button, you are brought to the thumbnail view showing
all images, with the current one being in focus, and likely all your high
school pictures around it.

In case you have loaded several images into the viewer, you can go
forth and back using Page Up and Page
Down. You can go to the first and last images
using Home and End. These functions
are of course also available from the context menu.

If several images was loaded into the viewer, you can ask it to run
them as a slide show, which means that KPhotoAlbum loads a new image every few
second. How often it loads a new image is configure by pressing the control
key and respective plus (for go faster) or minus
(go slower). Starting and stopping the slide show is
done simply by pressing Ctrl+S.

A very useful feature of the KPhotoAlbum viewer is it ability to go into
full screen mode. In this mode, the viewer is using the complete screen
space, simply press the return key to make it go into and out of full screen
mode.

Using the viewer, you may zoom in and out of your image, simply by
dragging out a rectangle with the mouse. Pressing the minus key will zoom
out again. Pressing the plus key will zoom in at the center of the image. Figure 5.3, “Zooming in the viewer” below shows how a zoom
rectangle is marked, and Figure 5.4, “Zooming in the viewer” shows the result of
the zoom.

Pressing the period key, lets you reset zooming, so the
image is shown un-zoomed. Pressing the equal sign will set the zoom level so
each pixel on the screen correspond to a pixel in the image.

Notice, for technical the only zooming operation that works when watching videos are zoom in and out
(the plus and minus key).

Figure 5.3. Zooming in the viewer

Figure 5.4. Zooming in the viewer

Choosing the rotate operations from the context menu, you may
rotate the image (Does not work for videos). You can annotate the current
image, simply by choosing Annotate in the context menu.

Setting Tokens from the Viewer

When viewing the images you may find that a given image contains a person
whose name you forgot to set on the images. At this time you may cancel
your viewing, and rush to the image configuration dialog to specify the
person. However, you may prefer to just tag the image and continue on
viewing images.

An alternative situation is if you want to sent a number of images
to a printer to get them developed on paper. To see which you want, you
start the viewer on the images, and tag them as good or bad while by
inspecting see each one.

For the above two examples the viewer offers you to set tokens on the
images when viewing them. Tokens are named from A to Z, and you set a token
simply by pressing its letter. In Figure 5.5, “An Image with Tokens”
you may see an image where the tokens A, B and C are set.

Categories (and esp tokens) may be displayed in the thumbnail
viewer. When Showing the categories in the thumbnail viewer, you may also
add tokens to images, simply by pressing the letter for the token when the
image is selected, this can be seen in
Figure 5.7, “Tokens seen in the Thumbnail Viewer”